Oracle ADF Mobile - Taking the pole position on Enterprise Mobility

With the advent of wireless technology and smartphones, world now realizes that this century will be the century of transformation, led by communication. We will continue to see massive changes in the way information is made available. This ongoing transformation is also being acknowledged by various industries, who in-turn, have started exploring various possibilities, challenges and opportunities with the changing environment.

But, with the highly complex platform landscape in the mobility world, aided by multitude of devices available, and concepts like BYOD; it becomes very difficult for organizations to plan, define and execute the enterprise mobility strategy. More so, leveraging it for business transformation, quick decision making and access to business critical information in real time, while on the move. This ensued in what we now know as 'the hybrid mobile application'.

Oracle, with its leadership position in Enterprise Solutions, identified Enterprise Mobility as potential business enabler and transformational catalyst, and launched its much awaited ADF Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) in October 2012.

Oracle has built this platform leveraging the open source framework 'Cordova'. It also took away developer's pain of writing code to integrate mobile solutions with backend systems and developing the UI for variety of form factors. It further eased out development by providing various techniques like visual and declarative tools to design, develop and deploy mobile applications for other dominant platform like iOS and Android, with a single code base.

ADF also leverages the power of Java and allows developers to integrate business logic in Java. Add to that, it provides out-of-box components to use various native devices features like GPS, email, camera, contacts and local databases on the mobile device. The framework also addresses security aspects in the app and provides multiple ways to authenticate the application. It further strengthens the security by allowing feature level control; so one can easily authorize features for various users. It provides support to standard SOAP and Restful services for integration with backend systems.

Taking the pole position on enterprise mobility

Oracle ADF has all the ingredients to be a unified platform for developing applications for diverse devices. Moreover the right mix of features and benefits like -

Support to open standards, Cordova plugin

Integration with native device libraries

Support to newer features of java and other related technologies

Adaptability of changing and evolving device platform with extension of support to new platform like Blackberry 10OS, Windows 8 Mobile

Bundled solution to MDM needs with the platform

Learning and development support on oracle ADF mobile academy

These features will undoubtedly allow the evolving, yet revolutionary, hybrid mobile application development platform - Oracle ADF - to deliver unprecedented business value-add to organizations. Organizations having Oracle as well as non-Oracle ERP applications can benefit from it, making ADF a top choice in platforms for enterprise mobile solutions, and thus take the pole position.

Note: I would like to thank Bharat Rao (Lead Consultant, Infosys) for his valuable inputs in this blog.